


brush the cobwebs off the sun

by SafelyCapricious



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Future Fic, djinn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-22
Packaged: 2018-05-28 11:01:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6326371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SafelyCapricious/pseuds/SafelyCapricious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A mission for an 0-8-4 (or inhuman, the report is a little murky) leads Jemma and her team to an abandoned psychiatric hospital. Obviously nothing creepy could be lurking in there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	brush the cobwebs off the sun

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jdphoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/gifts).



> Nominally for the prompt “But why was everybody kung fu fighting?” on tumblr, but I think you can all agree that I kind of shoehorned that in. This was originally intended to be a bit lighter but...ah, things happen. 
> 
> I haven't watched Supernatural in what feels like eons, but I always liked what they did with Djinns. I know this is _wildly_ different from the actual mythology surrounding djinns, but I hope you all enjoy anyways. 
> 
> Also, this is unedited but I am dedicating it to JD who has been just stupid amazing with helping me edit touch and she deserves all the love. ~~(And since I've decided, for the moment, that I hate the next chapter of that I might as well do this right?)~~
> 
> Enjoy!

SHIELD is recovering. They’re still understaffed but since Hive made HYDRA very public and SHIELD was able to visibly defeat him – and it – they’ve got their respectability back. (And their guest in Vault D, though he's let out under very heavy supervision sometimes.) They may never be able to move in the shadows the way they could before, but Jemma isn’t convinced that’s not a good thing.

 But SHIELD is still recovering and that means that even with the academies running again and their daily hiring of already trained individuals there are still only a small group of agents that the director trusts implicitly. Which means one of them always ends up on any mission that might be the least bit delicate – even when it’s not really in their area of expertise.

Jemma sneezes repeatedly when she enters the next room that’s hers to clear, ICER and scanner held before her. The reports they’d gotten had been a bit unclear and she’s not sure if they’re looking for a scared Inhuman or a 0-8-4, which makes searching the abandoned psychiatric hospital even more difficult than it would’ve been otherwise.

She’d assumed, prior to this, that most of the ‘abandoned insane asylum’ tropes she’d seen in badly done horror movies were not based on real life. (She’s hoping that she’s still not wrong in that count and it’s just that someone has used this entire building as a set for a movie that never got finished or…something.)

The number of discarded syringes on the floor, however, are likely the result of more recent occupation and Jemma calls in another warning over the coms to her team – if any of them comes back with tetanus or an STI from a mission Daisy is never going to let Jemma hear the end of it.

Jemma shudders as her scanner picks up various body fluids but nothing alien and enters the next room.

“West wing, clear,” Rodriguez says over the coms and Jemma can imagine the mocking salute that goes with it, “headed to join up with Matthews now.”

“Looking forward to it, boo,” is Matthew’s response and Jemma rolls her eyes.

She’s about to remind them to at least try to pretend to be serious on the channel – it is connected to SHIELD HQ and she doesn’t want to deal with another one of the ‘appropriate workplace conversations’ if she can help it – when there’s a blur darting through the room and her sensor starts sparking a multitude of warnings at her. “What –“ the face that’s right in front of her is slightly blue and pale with large dark eyes without pupils and she doesn’t even have time to draw a breath to give a warning before there are leathery fingers pressing against her temples and into her mind.

 She thinks she screams but she can’t hear it and she can’t be sure.

 

***

 

She wakes up unsettled and reaches for her phone. It’s six, and when she checks her alarm is still set for six twenty-five, so it’s not like she forgot to set it the night before. She rubs at her face and pushes her tangled hair out of her face, sitting up carefully so she doesn’t disturb her bed partner. She swings her legs over the side and is feeling around for her slippers with her toes when a firm arm around her waist drags her further back into the bed.

“S’still dark out, where’re you going?” His voice sounds growly and sluggish and she’s positive that her big bad specialist is only partially awake.

“Go back to sleep,” she says, twisting enough that she can kiss the edge of his mouth and then she’s trying to extract herself from his octopus-like embrace.

He doesn’t give her an inch, instead rolling them again so he’s propped up above her on one hand. His eyes are still sleepy but his voice is more aware when he says, “if you’re determined to be awake right now I think we can come up with something to do that doesn’t involve you leaving this bed.”

 She laughs and pushes at his chest. “It’s not that early, and there’s no way we’ll manage in less than half an hour – which means you’ll go to work with sex hair _again_ and you have an important mission today.”

His lips twitch and he leans down for a thorough kiss that almost convinces her, but then his hand is skating down her side and she remembers why this is a bad idea before he can make it anywhere interesting. She pushes at his chest and he lays to her side with a resigned sigh. “I can think of worse things than showing up to a mission with the two men in love with my girlfriend with proof reminding them she’s with me." 

She rolls her eyes and wiggles off the bed – she’s on his side now and she shamelessly steals his slippers, which are, of course, placed with military precision at the side of the bed. “Neither Fitz nor Daniels are in love with me – you do know you’re delusional right?”

He doesn’t say anything or make any noise but she _knows_ he’s rolling his eyes at her. She shakes her head, checks the time on his phone and then leans over the bed to give him one last kiss, evading his hands with practiced ease and heading towards the kitchen to get the coffee started.

He follows about ten minutes later, having showered but not shaved, and wraps his arms around her waist while she stands at the porch door watching the sunrise.

“I love you,” he murmurs against her neck, dropping a kiss there.

The brush of his jaw makes her shiver and she swats at his arm around her waist. “If you give me beard burn or a hickie, Grant Ward, I’m going to tell Daisy about that book I saw you lend to May.”

He laughs against her neck but leans back and rests his cheek against her temple and for a moment all she can see are shiny black eyes like a beetle's wing and needle like teeth bared in warning and – he lifts his cheek from her temple and drops a kiss to the top of her head and goes to get some coffee. She’s got a day in the labs to prepare for, after all, and he has his mission.

The rest of the day feels long, if unremarkable, but Jemma still feels strangely unsettled. She can’t pinpoint what it is though and so when Bobbi asks if she’s feeling okay for the twelfth time, after she’s jumped at an imagined blur of blue at the corner of her vision again, she decides that she’ll not try to finish this project tonight and heads home.

Grant isn’t there, of course, since his mission is likely to last at least two days, but he has left a note for her on the fridge that makes her laugh before she starts putting together an early, easy dinner.

She’s in the shower when she thinks she hears voices and she turns it off, heart pounding, but there’s only silence. When she turns it back on though she hears them again – but it sounds like Daisy, who Jemma knows is on vacation and visiting her mother this week, Fitz, who is on the mission with Grant, and the mechanic – Mack – who could have broken into her house, she supposes, but it seems unlikely.

There’s no one there when she emerges and she chalks it up to stress. She has half a glass of wine with dinner and then goes to bed. She always gets more sleep when Grant is gone, but it never feels as restful.

She dreams of walking through a decrepit building, broken syringes cracking under her boots, and a humanoid creature with long leathery fingers holding her hand.

She wakes up in a cold sweat with her heart pounding, even though there was nothing actively dangerous in her dream and she feels sore like she’s run a marathon. She gets a cold glass of water and sits in the kitchen for a while with all the lights on. It’s only just past midnight and she’ll know she’ll regret it if she doesn’t at least try to get some more sleep, so she finishes her water and goes back to bed.

This time her dreams feel like a memory – she dreams of fighting a creature that looks like Grant but isn’t and when they kill it his body is just lying there, limp and cold but then he’s taking a huge gasping breath and sitting up and she’s stepping out of his reach even though she knows with the surety that dreams bring that it _is_ Grant looking at her, through his eyes. She raises her gun – and it is a gun, not one of the knock-out guns that Bobbi designed – at him and wakes up before she can shoot him. She’s weirdly sure, however, that she didn’t. That they took him in and – what? Kept him locked up?

She rubs at her face with a tired hand and when her phone tells her that it’s fifteen minutes to six she decides to cut her losses and gets out of bed.

She takes a long shower but doesn’t feel like she’s able to wash her dreams away and they continue to dog her steps for the rest of the day. She comes home early again and sits in front of the TV not watching it.

When she presses against her temples, trying to chase the headache that her ibuprofen has done nothing against, she sees people in black tactical gear fighting against a blur of blue. She drops her hands with a gasp, just in time for the dumb blond on the sitcom she’s not watching to say “but why was everybody kung-fu-fighting?” The sound of canned laughter seems to echo after her even as she turns it off and goes to take a bath.

The water is warm and she sinks gratefully into it, the smell of ‘midnight rose’ calming her headache.

There are hands pushing her into the water and the blue face has shiny black eyes and long needle like teeth and she swings her arm wildly and –

 

***

 

 The first thing she sees is Rodriguez’s very concerned face. He’s got claw marks down the side of his face that are sluggishly dripping blood, one of them goes through his eyebrow and she can only imagine the kind of ridiculousness she’s going to deal with while he comes to term with that loss – she’s never understood how vain he is about his eyebrows but she’s grown accustomed to it.

“Simmons – fuck – talk to me, are you okay? Are you here?” His voice is frantic and rough and when she tries to speak she coughs up water and she realizes she’s lying in a tub filled with cold water.

She tries to grab the side of it and barely manages to wrap her fingers around the porcelain. “Get me out of this,” she manages after a moment before coughing again. Water and spit drip down out of her mouth and she’s too exhausted to care.

He pulls her out of it easily and hands her off to Matthews who has a very dusty curtain that is, apparently the best they can do for a towel. She shivers in his grip and wishes Grant was there which is –

Ward is a _monster_. He may be nominally on SHIELD’s side since they rescued him from Hive but he’s not –

She shivers more, not from cold, and lets Matthew wrap the curtain around her even though she’s likely to develop a rash from all the unmentionables it’s stained with.

"She's fine, we've got her. We'll wrap up here and be at the evac point in twelve minutes," Rodriguez is saying and the words don't make sense for a moment until Jemma realizes she's lost her ear com somewhere - likely while thrashing around in the water - and she wonders just who he's reassuring. Her money is on Daisy or Fitz.

“What happened – what was that – was there a blue humanoid here or did I imagine that?” Her voice is rough and she wonders just how long she’s been out and if it’s just near drowning or if she was screaming like she thinks she was.

“There was, it’s been taken care of,” Moghadam says and Jemma realizes that her entire team is here.

Moghadam is crouching nearby, holding the edge of another curtain off the ground and Jemma realizes there’s a body under it – her gaze skips around and she makes absolutely certain that all of her people are standing. Bishop is sanitizing Rodriguez’s facial wounds, Matthews is still holding her, Samuels is standing at one door, with her gun drawn and very clearly on guard and El Abbadi is at the other. Jemma lets herself relax.

“As for what it is,” Moghadam continues, “I can’t be sure but I’d lay money on a Djinn.” Moghadam adjusts his glasses and grimaces, dropping the curtain and raising from his crouch a little unsteadily before looking at Jemma with no small measure of concern.

Jemma huddles tighter into her curtain wrap and tries not to think about what that might mean about her hallucination. “Well,” she says, trying and failing to sound cheerful, “I guess we found the 0-8-4?”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find my writing tumblr [here](http://capriciouswrites.tumblr.com/). <3
> 
> Please let me know what you think!
> 
> (Also, I might be on painkillers because apparently organs are delicate so seriously, if something doesn't make sense _let me know_ , immediately.)


End file.
